Austin Jaffe

Austin Jaffe

Across the nation, more stories are surfacing about people owing more money than their houses are worth. The real estate market is still in a turmoil and even people with good credit histories are having financial problems. How could this be? From the mid-1990s until 2006, housing prices increased dramatically in parts of the United States including Southern California, Florida, Phoenix and Las Vegas. The rest of the country also experienced increases but not to the same extent. In 2006 sales slowed down and prices began to decline -- substantially in some markets.

In the late 1980s, real estate expert Austin Jaffe flew to Hungary to attend a conference on housing. Like all of Eastern and Central Europe, Hungary was on the brink of transition from state socialism to market capitalism. At the conference, Jaffe asked researchers, What does property mean here? How will it change if your country changes?

Those questions have since taken Jaffe, director of the Institute for Real Estate Studies at Penn State, to Poland, Russia, and the Czech Republic.